Grace and Peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Our daughter Eliza has been dating a very nice young man who happens to have an identical twin. Eric and his identical twin brother have the exact same DNA and genes. Identical twins develop from the same combination of egg and sperm for some reason, still unknown, this fertilized egg divides and creates two new ones precisely the same.
We've been learning a lot about the uniqueness of this from Eric, Lisa’s twin. He and his brother are very different. Eric is laid back and easy going, Brian is intense. They have different interests, yet when I first met Brian I mistook him for Eric. Even their mother has to spend a few minutes talking with them to tell them apart.
Today we read the story of the angel Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that she will bring the Messiah into the world. The way Jesus is conceived, the fact that God is truly his father in a way this is unique in all of history, helps us to understand what a blessing it is that in Jesus we encounter God, and in Jesus, God encounters us. The infinite and the eternal meld with and join to the finite and the mortal – those of us who are bound to die.
The first question we ask is how is Jesus God?
(Before we get too far, remember that we are necessarily talking by metaphor, by analogy. We will never be able to fully understand how Jesus and God are related.)
Does Jesus have God’s DNA, like Eric and Brian have? Is Jesus’ God’s twin? When we encounter Jesus, are we encountering God? The answer to these questions is “Yes”, kind of -sort of. God implants himself in Mary. God causes himself to gestate in Mary’s womb. The church calls Mary “theotokos”, a Greek word meaning, “the bearer of God”.
God wants a body so that the universal sovereign deity, the creator of all the world, the being that stands outside, and yet is at once contained in the ever expanding universe, can know experience and feel what it is like to be human. Jesus is God’s experience of what it means to live with all that we human beings live with and experience.
This is very good news for us. God, because of Jesus, understands what it is like to feel pain.
In 1990, I had to have a tumor in my neck removed. When I woke up from the operation, I felt like my flesh was on fire. They had cut into my flesh and sowed me together. The wound burned, throbbed and screamed at me. Medicine took care after a few minutes but until it kicked it, I felt tortured. God knows what I was feeling because God is Jesus with a body.
God knows, thanks to Jesus, what it is to feel grief. Because God is eternal, God cannot fear death, or understand the threat it imposes on us. The fear of death drives us to be self-protective. All manner of sin comes from this. We hoard food, wealth and all other substances that equal protective security. We cheat our neighbors if they work for us, and try to get as much work as we can out of them while paying them the least that we can. That’s how human nature, born of the fear of death, rules us. God can’t get it without somehow giving up his eternality. God does that in Christ. God is in a very real sense Jesus’ twin. To know death, fear of it and the temptation to sin that arises from it, God turns to Jesus.
Many twins have an unusual capacity to communicate over space and time. When one is experiencing trauma, like being in a car accident, the other senses their pain, as though it were happening to them as well. That’s a bit spooky isn’t it? Other twins have reported knowing the exact second when their identical sibling died, that they actually felt it in their body. Now that’s pretty weird too.
Could it be that God experienced the nails going into his “twins” hand on the cross? Could it be that God smelled the stench of manure, as in “manure happens” when he drew in his first breath in twin Jesus in the stable? Could it be that the Creator of all knows poverty, rejection and the humiliation that all third world peoples and captive nations know because God has seen, smelled, heard, touched ant tasted their defeat. Could God have felt the spear pierce twin Jesus’ side and felt him draw his last breath as he died?
Of course he could and did. It is more than a vicarious identification. God knows humanity – you and me – because God’s twin is Jesus. Prayer to this God makes so much sense. God feels with us.
Today’s lesson also raises some question about how God got Mary pregnant. The angel Gabriel, who has made several appearances throughout scripture and serves as God’s “aide-de-camp” cum administrative assistant says “Greetings favored one. You have found favor with God. You will conceive and become pregnant and your Son will be the ruler over the house of Jacob”. Astounding news. Mary is about 12-14 years old if we can believe Joel Green whose commentary I read when preparing for this sermon.
How would you responded if you had been Mary and were 12-14 year old?
“No way Jose!”
“You’ve got to be kidding me”.
“Get out of here”.
No, instead of unbelief and astonishment, Mary simply responds “Let it be to me, according to your Word”. In other words, “OK”.
How does Mary actually get pregnant? Well, that’s the million dollar question. We moderns understand that ½ of our genetic code comes from our Father. Yet, God is not a physical being. God is Spirit. We might say consciousness, pure energy. So if God doesn’t have DNA and Mary is a Virgin, does that mean that Jesus only has Mary’s DNA? Jesus would be a clone, or a carbon copy, a Xerox of Mary. We don’t know. The “How” of Jesus’ conception will remain forever a mystery.
Except for one thing. Mary conceived through her ear. (I know that will shock you medical types among us). She heard that she was to be pregnant and believed, faithed this baby into being. As we say, the rest is history – a very special salvation history.
In Jesus’ Name. Amen
Who We Are